The primary focus of our business is information systems software. This involves computers and communication which have given rise to some of the most controversial issues of our age. On this page we offer our own editorial contribution.

Web Development

    Browser interface with the web server is a major consideration in the design of web based applications. Also important is the interface between the web server and corporate data bases and computer system procedures that must be accessed by the web application.  WISL has been developing web applications since 1997. Early efforts utilized the Common Gateway Interface(CGI), the simplest and most common way to use an HTTP request to control the HTTP output of a server-side application. The application code was written in PERL script. CGI requires only that the server pass request information to the script and to be prepared for receiving the output to be returned to the client. There is no further support for building web applications. We developed our own session support to remember a user's state between requests, for a sequence of pages needed to complete an order, for example. Any data from corporate data bases required for the application was refreshed from the corporate server in batch mode. No attempt was made to develop applications that would require interactive access to corporate data or computer system procedures in the CGI environment.

    The results of the CGI efforts were quite successful, resulting in several working applications that effectively satisfy the desired features. Specifying a retail order(WISL Webstore) or determining the status of an order or a  shipment(WISL Weborder) can be effectively handled with these facilities. In addition most web servers provide support for CGI/Perl(hence the applications can fit into almost any customer's computing environment) and there is no third party licensing costs beyond the web server.

    Since we began our efforts with CGI there has been significant progress toward developing industry standards  and products that offer far more comprehensive web development environments. The Java 2 Enterprise Edition(J2EE) is a standard endorsed by an industry consortium consisting of Sun, IBM, Oracle, BEA, the Apache Group and a host of application server vendors. The major goal of these standards is to provide a development environment that would effectively support:

    A number of vendors have developed web application servers that follow the J2EE standard. Below is an illustration of the components of such a system:

    WISL considered some of these products along with the more proprietary solutions offered by vendors such as Microsoft and Netscape and decided to adopt JRun from Alaire as its primary web application server. It runs on all major platforms, its base language is Java and its components include Java Server Pages Tags and Enterprise JavaBeans. It supports an interface with the middleware from Informix(Redback) that provides access to objects(data and computer processes) in the environment that WISL offers its non-web based applications. WISL is currently developing two applications that require the facilities of this environment, WISL Webtrip(interactive optimization of truckload trips) and WISL Webrate(interactive rating of shipments). The robust capabilities of this environment come at a cost as substantial runtime license fees are payable for both JRun and Redback.

    Below is an illustration of the major components in this environment which continues to evolve to meet the expanding requirements to the web world.

    The evolution of web development tools is the latest iteration in a process that has spanned more than four decades. We in the information processing business have been involved in a constant effort to develop tools that translate between computer capabilities and human needs.